At the same time, it's a necessity that allows a civilization to adapt to
change and continue to survive.

Above all, science is a way of thinking, an approach to knowledge that
thrives in a climate of freedom and dies whenever ideological purity is insisted
on.

Science in America is in serious trouble, and therefore America is in
serious trouble.

Both the Right and the Left in America are pushing political agendas that
assail science on every side, banning whole swathes of research and treating
other areas as if the final word had already been achieved.

It's not as if there's some other nation poised to take America's place if
we let science get flushed down the toilet of politics. It's not an accident that
scientists from so many other countries come here to study.

And all the political pressures that are damaging science here in America
are even worse in Europe.

Money and Science

It would be lovely if we lived in an ideal world where scientists could
pursue whatever avenue most intrigued them. But the days of the dilettante
scientist are gone now. It takes serious money to do important research in
many fields.

Scientists who work for corporations or governments have their agendas
set by their sponsors. Universities are scarcely better -- the pursuit of tenure
and the doctrine of "publish or perish" makes it certain that research money
will almost always flow into projects that "look good" to the establishment.

Groundbreaking science, therefore, always happens on the fringes,
between disciplines, outside the establishment, and that means it is either
funded by eccentrics or is done on the cheap, at a theoretical level.

However, this does not mean that the money poured into "establishment
science" is wasted. This is where the journeyman work is done: testing,
extrapolating, applying, expanding on the work that the eccentrics have done.

By the time the average citizen hears about a scientific idea, chances are
it has already moved into the establishment.

And when Congress gets involved, the issue is no longer scientific at all,
but political.

Ironically, the establishment always protects and defends itself by
invoking the achievements of anti-establishment scientists -- even as the
continue to cut out, put down, or steal from today's real scientists.

But ... that's just the way the world works. The scientific establishment
always has a vested interest in shutting down innovation; but as long as
freedom survives, the innovative thinkers find a way and the new ideas bubble
to the surface somewhere.

What Can Government Do?

So here we have a solidly elected one-party government for the first time
in decades, with a lame-duck President who therefore has the freedom to make
bold decisions without thinking about how it will affect his reelection chances
(though of course he must think about how it will affect his party).

What, if anything, can this government do for, with, to, or about
American science?

(And let's just stop right now the silly idea that Republicans are somehow
anti-science and Democrats pro-science. Both of them are for whatever science
advances their own political agenda, and against any science that doesn't.
Politics is invariably the natural enemy of science, and all parties are guilty of
killing science for political ends -- especially when they are shouting loudest
about how their position is "supported by science.")

Or is the best policy to leave science alone?

Scientific research is, in fact, best handled by scientists -- and most
effectively stifled by them. One huge help to science would be to break the
stranglehold of the printed scientific journals. Right now, university libraries
are crippled by the necessity of paying thousands of dollars a year for each
single subscription to the leading scientific journals.

There is simply no excuse for this. Peer review is not that expensive, and
the internet would allow virtually free dissemination of scientific journals
without them ever needing to incur the expense of printing.

The government could transform the situation by declaring that no
federal grant money could be used to pay for subscriptions to any scientific
journal that is not made available in cheap -- i.e., nearly free -- electronic
form.

There will be screaming: "This is an attack on the core of scientific
research!" but you have to ignore this. It is the death cry of the disease that
you're hearing. There is no excuse whatsoever for access to scientific journals
to be limited by money. Every college student in the world should have nearly-free access to any journal in any field, and the internet makes it possible, and
our government can make it happen. It should be done, and done now.

Peer review is the key; and in a world of cheap journals, the competition
would cease to be for money, and instead would be for reviewers. Journals
would compete with each other for prestige, which would come from having the
most important innovative articles.

Reputations would rise and fall. Political groups would lose their iron
grip on various fields of research. Marginal journals would emerge and
compete for attention.

And big babies would complain that everything has gone to hell in a
handbasket because it is no longer the way it was in the old days -- when a
handful of editors in any given field could stifle research they didn't like.

Massive Projects

At the same time, government can achieve great things by dumping
money into massive projects -- provided the projects actually matter.

The space program of the '50's, '60's, and '70's not only got us the
immediate results -- footprints on the moon, a working shuttle, and enormous
prestige -- but also spun off vast areas of technology and science that would
have been impossible without that huge burst of energy.

It was one of the most productive uses of economic surplus that any
civilization has ever come up with. Way better than building pyramids. It
ranks up there with Portugal's sponsorship of navigation in the 1400s.

But getting humans Mars is not going to have anything like the same
impact as getting humans to the moon did, for the obvious reason that going to
Mars is simply more of the same. The potential benefits are relatively trivial.

The massive project we need right now -- one that is far more important
than the space program -- is energy research.

The reason is simple and clear. There is only so much extractable oil in
the earth, and nobody's making any more. And oil is so useful for constructive
purposes that it is criminal for us to have burnt so much of it already.

Fuel Reduction Technologies. Hybrid engines are a wonderful
development, and the government should level the playing field by making
hybrid technology mandatory in a series of stepped goals.

Likewise, alternative fuels need to be explored. But keep this in mind:
All the alternative fuels and fuel reduction technologies being touted right now
are simply moving the problem around or shrinking it, not solving it.

For instance, hydrogen as a fuel is a chimera: Because you can't drill for
hydrogen, you have to make it, and that costs fuel. What fuel? Coal or natural
gas or oil, of course. In other words, hydrogen is an energy storage device, not
a source of energy -- in effect, a bulky, expensive battery. So even though
hydrogen is the only combustible fuel that burns absolutely cleanly, it is never
in itself going to solve the long term energy problem.

Batteries. Which brings us to battery research. Computers, phones,
and games have driven battery research to really incredible achievements. And
hybrids will only become universally practical when battery size shrinks to a
quarter of the present bulk. Right now, in a hybrid car you have to give up
such a large amount of space to the batteries that there are many needs that
the hybrids just can't meet. (Plus, of course, hybrids don't achieve anywhere
near as much fuel savings on long-distance drives.)

If you define "batteries" as "energy-storage systems," then hydrogen and
fuel cells and other developing technologies are part of this essential research.
We have to be able to store energy for later use, safely and in a small space.

Renewable Energy Sources. Petroleum, natural gas, and coal are non-renewable. When they're gone, they're gone. So our goal must be to completely
replace them. We need to pursue this goal with the same relentless
determination that we applied to the space program. Anything less than the
total elimination of the burning of natural hydrocarbons will be failure, as
surely as if all our rockets had blown up before leaving the atmosphere.

There are four basic sources of renewable energy: the sun, radioactive
elements, wind, and the heat from the core of the Earth. (And yes, I know that
wind is partly solar in origin; but it is also partly a result of the rotation of the
Earth, so it deserves separate consideration.)

Solar energy includes hydroelectric power, of course -- it is the sun's
evaporation of water that puts it at high elevations, so that we can harvest the
energy of gravity as the water then returns to sea level.

Most of these sources of energy have downsides:

Hydroelectric power in the form of big reservoirs with turbines require
that land be covered with water -- and too often it's choice soil land. (Micro-turbines and tidal turbines may yet provide a significant amount of energy.)

Nuclear energy has the grave problem of creating deadly waste that can
go on killing for thousands and thousands of years.

Wind energy is absolutely clean, but can only be harvested with
machinery that takes up space and needs servicing. Nevertheless, this is the
most promising immediate source of renewable, nonpolluting energy, and there
is simply no excuse for not putting high-wind land to use in wind farms.

(To those who say that wind farms "spoil the view," I answer: not as
much as smog; they have a beauty of their own; and if you think your private
aesthetics should trump the longterm survival of high-level civilization, I think
you're a lunatic.)

Harvesting geothermal energy is really a matter of engineering as much
as science, and that means that dumping money into research in that area has
a high likelihood of yielding results in the long run.

Ultimately, however, the most important area of research is artificial
photosynthesis -- another way of looking at photovoltaics.

Almost all life on Earth is built on the foundation of photosynthesis, in
which plants take sunlight and turn it into usable energy. (And all our current
burnable fuels are really just harvesting a billion years of photosynthesis.)

That's the achievement we need to duplicate to supply longterm energy
for transportation and manufacturing, in order to keep civilization alive for the
next few million years.

Right now, that means photovoltaics -- efficient direct conversion of solar
energy into electricity. But with enough money and freedom, scientists and
engineers might be able to find other, better ways of converting sunlight to
usable energy.

Cost Effectiveness. The trouble with these avenues of research is that
they are as economically impractical as, say, building a transcontinental
railroad was in 1869 or going to the moon was a century later. Without
government willing it to be so, there was no short-term financial benefit.

The only reason that anybody got rich from building the transcontinental
railroad was that they got free land on either side of the right-of-way (and they
cheated the government and their stockholders, but that's another story).

If we wait until oil is so rare and expensive that alternative sources of
energy become financially competitive, it will be too late. Shamefully so.

We have to find alternatives before the oil is gone. And that requires
government action, because the free market, left to itself, will burn all the
cheap oil -- whereupon there is a high likelihood of an unrecoverable crash,
because science cannot take place on the same timescale as market forces.

In other words, if government doesn't force the issue by funding research
and then radically deincentivizing the burning of fossil fuels, free market
capitalism will drink itself to death on oil. And our civilization will die with it.

There is no more important science project our government can embark
on.

And, ironically, it is also the most important thing we can do for our
national defense.

I can't think of a more urgent place for President Bush to invest his
political capital. And if he does it, he will be remembered for it the way we
remember Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase and Lewis & Clark expedition,
Lincoln's transcontinental railroad, and Eisenhower's interstate highway
system.

We could, quite literally, save the world.

What About Space?

Does that mean that I think we shouldn't go to Mars?

In a word, yes.

But I do think we have important work to do in space.

Every year, the Earth is struck by thousands of meteors. Most of them
tiny and harmless.

Every few thousand years, though, we get some pretty big meteors.
Damaging ones. And even more rarely, we get meteors so huge that they cause
mass extinctions.

When will the next big meteor fall? Nobody knows. Might not be for a
million years. Might be tomorrow.

But if we wait until a big meteor is sighted before we start coming up
with ways to save the Earth from a collision with it, it will be too late.

Compared to fuel-replacement research, anti-meteor research really
seems like pie-in-the-sky, doesn't it? And it will continue to seem that way
until it's needed. At which point, whoever created an effective collision-avoidance system will look like the greatest human who ever lived.

And in fact, we really don't need to wait for the Really Big Meteor for
such a project to be cost effective. The most dangerous meteors will be those
too small to detect at a great distance, but just large enough to cause localized
devastation. Not the mass-extinction meteors, but the wipe-out-Kansas City
meteors. And those are much likelier to show up and need dealing with.

So I don't much care about Mars. I do, however, care very much about
going farther than Mars, to the asteroid belt, where we can work on
technologies to deflect or destroy asteroids.

And as long as we're out there, we might as well figure out how to mine
those suckers and make the project recover some of its cost.

Does all this sound like science fiction and not the "real world"?

Look around you, kids. You're living right now in a world that would
have been science fiction a hundred years ago. In fact, the great failure of
science fiction is that it didn't begin to predict most of the important
transformative technologies of our time.

Meteors: We know they're coming; we know they can destroy us; we don't
know yet how to stop them. You want a space program? That's the one with a
practical goal, even though it might be a very long time before it proves its
worth.

But a government like ours can be forgiven for regarding meteor-deflection as a low priority. That's just too far ahead for most politicians to
think.

The elimination of burning hydrocarbons, though -- that has immediate
as well as long-range benefits, and it will be a mark of shame for this
Republican government if they don't provide us -- and our children -- with a
renewable way to move things and make things.

 Many people have asked OSC where they can get the facts behind the rhetoric about the war. A good starting place is: "Who Is Lying About Iraq?" by Norman Podhoretz, who takes on the "Bush Lied, People Died" slogan.